The Heat of the Sun

crest. The century was in its twenties, and so was I. Naturally, on leaving Yale, I had headed back to the place I called home
since my days in France: Aunt Toolie’s huge shabby apartment above a speakeasy in an alley off Christopher Street. When my father died on the Pont Saint Michel, Aunt Toolie became all the
family I had.
    Wobblewood, as her apartment was known, took its nickname from its treacherous floorboards. Half of them had buckled with damp or in places rotted through, and supplementary planks, sheets of
cardboard, old doors, a legless table, several prone bookcases, and an antique Russian chessboard did their best to supply the lack, with ratty carpets flung on top. At Wobblewood, the energies of
Greenwich Village gathered to a point. There, I wrote the poems that I imagined would make me famous. There, I first grew drunk on bathtub gin, and woke up for the first time with a stranger in my
bed. And there, one blustery November evening in 1926, I met again the boy – the man – whom I would always call Trouble.
    Aunt Toolie had thrown one of her many parties. Each party had a purpose, or began with one. The goal this time was to premiere that now-celebrated atonal composition (the beginning, critics
said later, of modern American music), Arnold Blitzstein’s Sonata in No Key . Blitzstein, a wiry, wild-haired Austrian who, at that time, spoke barely a word of English, was my
aunt’s latest discovery. She had found him sleeping rough one night in Washington Square Park and, upon learning he was a composer, became at once convinced of his genius. ‘It’s
frightfully moderne ,’ she told her guests, enthusing about the work they were shortly to hear. ‘Oh, the bit where he beats on saucepan lids... a commentary, Arnold says, on the
alienation of the worker from the means of production.’
    That night, as on many a night before, while guests mingled against walls hung with avant-garde posters and paintings, I guzzled gin, knowing I would regret it later, and was not sorry to be
drunk by the time Blitzstein bashed out Sonata in No Key on the tuneless upright – and the saucepans on top of the piano, ranged in order of size.
    I was wondering when it would be safe to slip away when Aunt Toolie appeared beside me and whispered beneath the cacophony, ‘Darling, I need your help. One word: Agnes.’
    ‘Not again!’ For months my aunt had been in one crisis or another over this runaway Catholic schoolgirl, a would-be actress of no discernible talent who gloried in the stage name of
Agnes Day. Few of our circle had time for Miss Day; Aunt Toolie had all the time in the world.
    ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Another career debacle? So soon too! Or perhaps it’s love. Is Matterhorn still the one?’
    ‘If only! Matterhorn’ – Aunt Toolie’s name for a mountain-climber beau of Miss Day’s – ‘has gone, I fear, the way of all flesh.’ (Whether this
meant he had fallen to his death or merely ended his tenure in the lady’s affections, I did not manage to ask.) ‘So many lovers, and all bagatelles – shallow diversions of
restless girlhood! It’s time she was settled. You know what this means, darling? Copley Wedger. They’re both here tonight. I’m relying on you. Lead the horse to water. And this
time, make her drink.’
    ‘Such confidence in my abilities!’
    Wobblewood grew wilder as the evening wore on. By midnight, revellers from the speakeasy downstairs had joined us, presumably without being invited. Where Agnes Day had gone, I had no idea. For
a time I talked to the Songbird Sisters, although this was difficult, as golden-haired Maisie leaped in to answer any remark addressed to Daisy, while copper-haired Daisy seemed always eager to
leave, yet reluctant to do so without her sister. Later I succumbed to the attentions of a Spanish lady said – by Copley Wedger, an expert in such matters – to be a notorious
prick-tease . The lady, known popularly as Conquistador, propelled me to the door of my room before turning abruptly, pecking me on the lips, and spiriting herself away. I was disappointed and
relieved.
    ‘Limehouse Blues’ blared from the phonograph, and couples, trios, and blissful solitaries were stomping recklessly on the hazardous floor by the time Aunt Toolie, sober as always,
demanded of me whether Miss Day had agreed yet to marry Copley Wedger.
    ‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why you’re so keen for her to marry at all. What could be